Today, in an exclusive preview from the new issue of the Jewish Review of Books, preeminent Kabbalah scholar Daniel Matt steps away from his Zohar translation for the first time in years to review Lawrence Krauss's New Atheist account of the Big Bang and Alan Lightman's quirky novel about creation. Special to Jewish Ideas Daily readers: Click here to receive a free copy of the whole summer issue!

Editors' Picks

Original DialecticAlan Brill, Kavvanah. Unlike most Jewish thinkers, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik acknowledged the doctrine of Original Sin—but argued that it did not corrupt man, but split him in two.

Darkness on the DeepPhilologos, Forward. “Is Genesis’s description of the universe at its inception, before the creation of light, a radically reimagined, reworked and de-mythologized rendering of the Babylonian legend?”